Polski Faust w latach przełomu : o "Dzienniku 1955-1960" Mieczysława Jastruna

Abstract

Ute diary of the years 1955—1960 is an intimate diary, it is a description of the experienced dilemmas, a collection of confessions concerning his friends and relations, a story of his grappling with reality, with the literary circles, which were strongly tied to the political system, and with himself, with his own choices. What, however, appears in it above all is, particularly since 1957, „the shame of literature and of the writers’ consciences”, which point to an evolution of the diary’s pragmatic design. As a result, we have to do here, side by side with the plane of the author’s self-presentation, also with a public plane thanks to which the diary becomes also a historical document. That is why it is a peculiar diary, for it is not a reflection of the process of the poet’s ideological transformation (which tends to be important in intimate texts), and its dramatic axis is the question of how one should function, as an artist and as a human being, in the whirlpool of political and social transformations. The Diary seems at first only to be an autotherapeutic mental oasis in a world of corrupted values, an expression of the poet’s fear and helplessness in front of the political mechanisms in which literature and writers were involved. With time, in becomes, however, an expression of the poet’s rebellion against the political system that reifies man, the artist, and literature, and a herald of the poet’s future creative fulfilment.